Chapter 23: Bread and Salt Again

I said yes with the bird still in his hand.

He pinned it inside my coat, over my heart, and I was laughing and crying so hard the cypress shook.

Six months later I sat at the head of my family's table for the first time in my life.

The dining room of the big house was lit with every candle my mother owned.

My hair had come back in short and soft, and Ciro kept putting his hand on it when he thought I wasn't looking.

The four heads of the other families sat down the long sides of the table, each with a wife or a son.

The oldest, with his cane hooked on his chair, had asked for the seat nearest the fire.

Carlo sat at the foot, where the Don's chair had stood, in an ordinary wooden one he had carried in himself.

My mother ran the kitchen, and she did it as the regent of the house, not the Donna.

She had said so to the four old men on the first day.

She served the soup herself.

Bianca sat across from me, thinner than I'd left her, with a light in her face that hadn't been there at the cemetery.

She had flown back from Buffalo that afternoon.

There was a new gold ring on her thumb, a Landi crest, and on her throat the silver bird.

When Ciro came in, she stood, and he held out his arms.

She stepped into them without a word.

The room watched them, the brother and the sister, one of them dark and one of them fair, with the same set to their shoulders.

"She's learned the song," Ciro said over her head.

"All four verses," Bianca said into his coat. "He's terrible at the third."

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